Buying “free and clear” means buying from someone who doesn’t owe anything on his or her property. The idea is that, you can buy at their price, if you give a down payment (sometimes borrowed from a private lender) and convince the seller to take their price in installments, with no interest. According to the gurus, the sellers accept this, and are grateful. I wonder if I’ll meet sellers like them.

I bought a list of free-and-clear properties in my area; they are almost all commercial properties. Lots and lots of auto repair places, and office buildings, retail buildings, medical buildings, and a very few houses. I was startled! I thought there would be more houses! I wonder if I made a mistake in laying out the requirements for the list. Can I buy an office building? An auto repair place? I wonder what I would do with that. Perhaps I have to expand the geographic area in order to find more houses. What will become of this technique?  Maybe it’s something unique about my area, or maybe I just didn’t use a large enough population area.

Usually I give the list to a virtual personal assistant to send letters, but I’m not sure where to send letters! Maybe it’s worth the change. The sellers of a free-and-clear property can hold a mortgage, secondary to your private money mortgage, and receive payments on their asking price (no interest) for years. You can take some cash out of the private money you borrow for the down payment. Or so they say. It still seems like a bit of a scheme to me.

The business is changing fast!

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